Rose Daughter (38 page)

She heard the first bird heralding the dawn; two notes, then
silence. “Tell me/’ she said lo the poor lost Beast, held close by the thorny
tangled weave of rose stems, where he could not have stirred even had he wanted
to. “Tell me where your rose grows! It must have struck!
I
say it must
have struck! I am coming back to you, do you hear me? Help me! As you made a
mistake when you brought me to you, so I have made a mistake now! And as I released
you from yours, release me now from mine!’”
Lord Goodman died far me today,
I’ll die for him tomorrow.

A second bird called. Beauty took a deep breath, trying not
to begin crying yet again. I have done nothing but weep this evening, she
thought. If I had wept less and thought more, 1 would not be—and then the tears
came very close indeed, and she had to hold her breath altogether to keep them
in.

She let her breath out finally and stood quietly, feeling
her shoulders slump, listening to a third and fourth and fifth bird. I must
bring the birds back to the Beast’s garden too, she thought idly; I want to
hear them singing when we stand in the orchard together.... And then there was
a scent on the air she remembered, a scent unique to itself, threading its way through
all the other rose scents, heavy in the dew of predawn, and she turned and
walked down the crosspath to the edge of a little side bed, still half invisible
in the tentative light of early dawn. And there were two tiny, rather weakly
bushes, but they were both alive, and by next season they would be growing
strongly. One of them was wisely conserving all its strength for growing roots
and leaves: the other one held one black-red bud, much smaller than the buds of
its parent bush and barely open, open just enough for its first wisp of perfume
to have escaped. She knelt by it slowly and touched it with the hand that still
held the last petal from the dead flower, and as she knelt, she heard her
sisters come up behind her.

She did not rise, but she turned her head to look at them.
“Give me your blessing, please,” she said, “and know that I will come back to
you when I can. But I must go back to my Beast just now, for he needs me most.
Jeweltongue, give your Mr Whitehand his day, and let Aubrey Trueword and
Lionheart share it, and have your wedding, and know that I bless you in it,
wherever I am. Tell Father I love him, and 1 am sorry to have missed this
meeting with him.

“And—and most especially know that I love you and that it is
true that our hearts beat in one another’s breasts.” And for the first time in
what felt like years, her hand touched the little embroidered heart that
Jeweltongue had made her, on her leaving for the Beast’s palace the first time,
but she did not draw it out from beneath her shift, and it was only then that
she realised she was wearing the dressing-gown Jeweltongue had made for her.
only last winter, that she had refused to take with her last spring. It smelt
of washing day and faintly of dust, and she knew, even as she had known at her
leaving, that neither of her sisters would have used it for the sorrow of her
going.

She turned back to look at the little rose; it was half open
now, and one of its outermost petals was trying to curl back. free from its
sisters. “And... feed these two little bushes! Give them a few of the oldest,
rottenest. shrivelledest scrapings from the back of the manure heap, just a
few, not too many—that is what they like. Even if you haven’t time to build a
compost heap, you can do that. Cuttings are very tender. They must be
encouraged, not bullied, into growing.” She seized the petal that was
separating itself from the others and gave it a gentle tug; it came free in her
hand, and she set it in her mouth.

She had remembered nothing of her earlier journey from the
Beast’s glasshouse to the hearth-rug in Rose Cottage, but after she finished
speaking to her sisters and set another rose-petal in her mouth, she seemed to
fall into a dream, or rather into her old nightmare dream, when she was walking
down a series of long dark corridors with a monster waiting for her at the end
of all. And sometimes she hurried, for pity of the poor monster, and sometimes
she tarried, for fear of it; but as she walked, and ran, and walked again, her
anxiety rose and rose and rose till she no longer knew if she felt frightened
or pitying and compassionate, only that there was this great humming something
possessing her mind and her body and her spirit. And she felt less and less
able to defy it, to think her own thoughts, to wrench her own will free of it,
to set down one foot after another to her own direction, and not because she
was driven to do so.

“My Beast,” she murmured, but her voice made no sound. She
put her hands to her throat and spoke again: “My Beast. I seek for my Beast,
and I know him, and he is no monster.” But though she felt her throat vibrate
with her voice, she could not hear her words; and then she touched one hand to
its opposite forearm, and there too was a vibration such as she had felt in her
throat; and now she felt it through the soles of her bare feet, an itchy,
fretful, maddening sensation.

She ran again, and this time she ran for a long way, till
she had to stop for weariness. But when she stopped, she stood restlessly,
lifting first one foot and then the other, disliking the contact with the
thrumming floor; and she could no longer say if the darkness in her eyes was
from exhaustion or the dimness of the corridors she ran down.

This will not do, she thought, and she sat down on the floor
with her back against one wall, and closed her eyes, and tucked her feet under
the hem of her dressing-gown, and wrapped the dressing-gown as close as she
could round all of her, and she tried to think. Her legs were trembling from
the long run they had just had, but she could feel the humming through her seat
bones, though there was no audible sound in her cars, only the drumming of
blood and fear. She thought of trying to speak aloud again, but then she
thought: No. I have tried that experiment, and I know its result. I will not
repeat it, over and over, to frighten myself again and again, till I am too
frightened to do anything at all. I must find my Beast and tell him ... tell
him ... I must find him.

She opened her eyes and looked both ways up and down the corridor,
and all she could see in either direction was more corridor, the dull figures
of its wallpaper, the occasional loom of furniture or ornament, and the
driblets of light from the sconces. There were no windows and no doors. The hum
she felt through her seat bones, through her back, through her entire body
seemed suddenly both fiendish and triumphant, and she got to her feet again
abruptly. “No,” she said, or rather, her mouth shaped die word, but she gave no
voice to it that she would not be able to hear. “No.” And silently in her mind
she said: You will not have me so easily, nor will you have him.

She turned round and started to walk back down the corridor
she had come up. No! No! No! shrieked ... something. Some soundless
subvibration of the hum that filled the corridor demanded that she turn round;
but she had made her choice, and now she put one slow, heavy foot down after
the other by her own will and of her own choice, and while each footstep was
very hard, dragged as it was in the opposite direction, it was also a victory
for her, and the hum changed its inaudible note and became fury.

She closed her eyes against it. She could not see it any
more than she could hear it, but in this darkness of her own choosing she could
hug herself round with her own thoughts, her own being, her own knowledge of
her self and of her existence, as she hugged herself round with the
dressing-gown her sister had made for her. She had none of her outer senses
left: Blindness she had chosen, hearing and touch were deadened by the
noiseless vibration, and her mouth was full of the flavor and scent of the
rose-petal. She put one hand to her lips, touched the fingers with her tongue;
here she felt no alien vibration, only the faint stir of her breath against her
own skin.

She walked forward, expecting at any moment to bump into a
wall, but she did not. And as she walked, hearing nothing but the silent
pressure of not-hearing, she thought she began to hear some faint echo, as of
wind, or footsteps in a cavern; and she listened, hopefully, and as she
listened, she caught a faint smell—like that of damp earth—and her toes struck
against something that was neither planed wood nor tile nor carpet fibre, and
in astonishment she opened her eyes.

She stood in complete darkness. When her eyes opened, and
she still could not see, she had stopped automatically. She blinked several
times, waiting for her sight to clear, but the darkness remained. She held a
hand up before her face and could see it no more than she had been able to hear
her voice a little while before, and a little “Oh!” escaped her lips without
her meaning it to and... she heard it. I am returned one while another is taken
from me, she thought. Well.

She put her hands out on either side of her and felt rough
crumbly wall with her right; she moved a little to her left and found a similar
wall there. She faced left and ran her hands over the wall, and a few little
earth crumbs fell away from her touch, and she realised she was walking on bare
earth, and there was grit between her toes. Her feet were still half numb from
the thrum of the corridor, and inclined to curl involuntarily away from what
they stood on, without recognising that the irritation was gone. She let her
hands climb upwards and found the earth corridor was quite low, and over her
head she felt twining, irregularly hairy surfaces that she thought—and suddenly
hoped—might be the roots of trees.

She began to walk forward again, in the direction she had
been going, with her hands held out in front of her. She was walking much more
slowly now, not from the effort of struggling against the intangible will that
had wished her to turn round but from a simpler fear of the dark, of blindness
without choice. She closed her eyes again, because she was making her head ache
by straining to see when she could not; the darkness seemed a little less oppressive
with her eyes shut, as the hum had been a little more bearable when she did not
try to speak.

But her heart had risen with that first smell of earth, and
it beat more strongly now that there was no foreign vibration trying to force
it to follow some other rhythm; and in her mind she was trying not to let a
certain idea form itself too clearly, in dread of disappointment.

Her outstretched hands touched a smooth surface. She stopped,
both because she had to and because that hopeful idea would no longer be
suppressed. She ran her hands quickly over the surface that blocked her way,
found its squared edges, like a door strangely set in the end of this corridor
of raw earth, and her heart beat very quickly indeed. Very well, it was a door,
but could she open it? And where would she be if she could and did?

A tiny depression halfway down the left-hand edge, only
about the size of a fingertip, with a tiny finger-curved latch or peg within
it, as if the hole were a keyhole and a finger the key; and there was a small
click, and she felt the door give. She pushed it and saw sunlight outlining the
crack of its opening, and a few tears fell from her dark-strained eyes, and she
stepped out from behind the summer tapestry into her rooms in the Beast’s
palace.

Her strength returned to her in a rush at the sight of her
rooms; but she hesitated, and turned away from her first impulse, and instead
allowed herself a moment to stand on her little balcony and look round her. The
glasshouse twinkled in the late-afternoon sun; but for the first time the sight
of it could not lift her heart, and her only thought was to wonder what day it
was and how long she had been gone.

Then she ran out into the chamber of the star and found all
the doors open, and she chose one and ran through it, running down the twisting
corridor towards the door into the courtyard, to the glasshouse, where she had
left die Beast.

But the corridor did not lead her there. It led her to other
corridors, lo rooms, halls, staircases, antechambers, and more corridors, more
and more doors to choose, one over another, always in hopes that the door she
sought lay just beyond. All the doors she saw were already open, but she would
not have trusted any that chose themselves for her.

Late afternoon gave way to twilight; it would be full dark
soon. She plodded on. She began to wonder if she were merely going round and
round the huge palace square, if the occasional apparently pointless half
flights of stairs up or down were carrying her unaware over the carriage-ways
to the wild wood and the orchard, though these came at no regular intervals;
nor did any stairs seem to hold any relationship to any other stairs. She was
increasingly oppressed by the vastness of the palace and the slightness of her
own presence in it, and she recalled the evil hum of the dream corridor
changing to a note of triumph; but she was near the end of her final strength
now and of her hopes. One knee and one ankle throbbed as if bruised, and
vaguely she remembered, as if it had happened in another life, that she had
banged herself painfully against the ladder when the wind had seized her from
beneath the Beast’s sheltering arm.

Once she paused in a corridor that seemed familiar—but so
many of them seemed familiar—paused by what appeared to be a stain on the
carpel. There were never stains on the carpet in the Beast’s palace, any more
than there were marks on the wallpaper, smudges on the furniture, or chips off
the statues. The carpet here was crimson, solid crimson, and unfigured, which
was perhaps how the stain had caught her eye; it was not very large, much
nearer one edge of the carpet than the other, and looked a little like a
three-petalled flower or the first unfurling of a rose-bud. The stain was
brown, perhaps a rusty brown, but difficult to tell against the crimson of the
carpet. It might have been blood. She knelt and touched it gently, not knowing
why she did so, and opened her right palm and looked again at the three small
scratches there left by the Beast’s rose.